Odd Apocalypse (34 page)

I overcame my tremors and slid the new blade into the score line on the bracelet. “But your father used the machine in just that way.”

“He didn’t intend to kill me, only my mother. Once the shooting was done, he had one moment of remorse.”

Sawing at the bracelet, I said, “He rode the chronosphere back to some point before he killed you. He parked there.”

“Shortly after it happened, he went back in time. He was waiting in the stable when my mother arrived with me. He took a handgun with him and shot her to death in front of me.”

Earlier, speaking of the moment that his mother had been shot while riding Magic, the boy had said,
I never saw him kill my mother that time
.

That time.

“He didn’t shoot Magic, only her. But when he brought me back with him to present-time Roseland, the stallion was still dead on the front lawn. And so was my mother. And so was I.”

I raised the hacksaw from the bracelet.

Each time I looked directly into the boy’s bottomless eyes, I was profoundly disquieted to see such a deeply wounded soul gazing out at me from the prison of his ageless body. Nevertheless, I was compelled to look, so he might see in my eyes that I understood his terrible anguish, without my having to speak of it.

“ ‘What has happened will happen,’ ” I said, repeating his words to me. “ ‘Call it fate.’ ”

By taking his son out of the settled history of the past, by taking him
outside
of time and then back to the present, Constantine Cloyce had created a paradox. I knew all about time paradoxes from movies and books, but none the equal of this one. If you thought too much about it, your mind would tie itself into a Gordian knot that could be neither untied nor cut.

Timothy said, “They put my mother’s body in the subcellar of the mausoleum, so he could look at her whenever he wanted, for reasons only his twisted mind can fathom. Sempiterno and Lolam—whose names then were Carlo Luca and James Durnan—worked through the night with Chiang to get the horse off the lawn and into a grave in the meadow.”

Setting to work with the hacksaw again, I said, “And your body? I mean … the body of that other Timothy?”

“The bullet had passed through. There was no way to know with what weapon I … he had been shot. So they jammed the corpse into the footspace in front of the passenger’s seat in my mother’s car. Glenda drove it very far south along the Coast Highway and parked it in a lay-by that was a lonely place back in those days. Sondra followed in another vehicle. They smeared my mother’s blood on the driver’s seat and floorboards, and left her car there with the doors wide open.”

“An attempted kidnapping gone wrong?”

“That’s what the cops were meant to assume.”

“The bad guys took your mother but then she died on them before a ransom could be demanded.”

“Something like that.”

“And the cops bought it?”

“My father was widely respected. Besides, certain authorities could be bought then, just like certain of them can be bought now. He knew who, and how to do the buying.”

“It must have been a big story.”

“Not as big as you think. Remember, he owned lots of newspapers. He reined in his editors. And he had enough dirt on his competitors to rein them in, too. He had no political enemies, as William Hearst did, and when he withdrew into Roseland in apparent grief and became to all appearances a depressed recluse, they let him alone.”

“Your ashes … the other Tim’s ashes are in an urn in the wall of the mausoleum.”

“Yes.”

“Whose ashes are in her urn?”

“No one’s. Officially, her body was never found. Her interment was strictly symbolic. Of course there aren’t ashes in my father’s urn, either.”

The blade sawed through the last of the link, and the monitoring bracelet slipped off his wrist.

“For years, I was kept under lock and key, or literally on a leash, until technology developed that allowed them to monitor me like this.”

I dropped the saw and got to my feet.

As he rose from the armchair, Timothy said, “I’m dead. Yet I’m alive. The thread of my life was cut off that night, yet here I am. My mind has grown complex, mature, but physically I never change. I’ve lived as an adolescent and as an adult only through books, only by reading about life beyond nine. I’m a boy forever, and already I’ve been a boy longer than I can bear.”

I’d pretty much had enough. Enough death. Enough crazy. Enough surprises of the kind that didn’t come with a party hat. Enough weirdness. Enough of Roseland. If they ever turned this place into a bed-and-breakfast, they weren’t going to get an endorsement from me.

I led Timothy cautiously into the south hall on the second floor. The house was so quiet that I might have thought I’d gone deaf if my intestines hadn’t been grumbling about my indulgence in Shilshom’s quiche and cheesecake.

According to Timothy, Nikola Tesla’s uncannily silent machinery not only managed time but, harnessing the thermodynamic consequences that arose from that management, also produced all of the power that the estate needed. It was in essence a perpetual-motion machine, a perfect example of green energy. Well, except for the humanoid pigs hell-bent on killing anything that crossed their path.

Also according to Timothy, several years usually passed between those occasions when the fantastical machinery for some reason pulled moments of the future into the present, though sometimes it happened more frequently. I was just lucky enough to arrive at the
height of the season, which was way more exciting than being in Vermont when the trees put on their autumn colors.

Until the visitors from Kenny Mountbatten’s hideous future were no longer phasing in and out of this current moment in Roseland’s history, until the steel shutters went up, the only way out of the main house was the way that I had sneaked into it.

After Constantine Cloyce and his crew found Victoria behind the boilers in the furnace room, the lot of them would come charging up from the basement in unrighteous indignation, looking for a fry cook to kill. We had to be in position to get past them and out through the copper-clad tunnel to the mausoleum.

I didn’t like the open sweep of the main stairs. I didn’t like the complete exposure of the spiral bronze stairs in the library. I didn’t like either set of service stairs because they were the ones most likely to be used by a spitting-mad Victoria Mors and her kinky coconspirators.

The only thing I liked was being beamed wherever we wanted to go, as in
Star Trek
, but such a convenient mode of travel hadn’t been invented yet. With pistol in hand, I led the boy to the farther end of the south hallway, past the entrance to the library mezzanine, and along the west wing to the front service stairs.

I may not be able to chew gum and play basketball at the same time or even play basketball without gum, but I can think fast on my feet. I have to, because I never plan ahead. There’s no point to planning ahead when any damn crazy thing can happen around me at any moment. Since I tend to make it up as I go along, I have got to be quick about making decisions when the crunch comes.

Unlike me, Timothy had a plan. He’d given his situation a lot of thought. He wanted to be taken to the chronosphere, to travel not to the night his mother was murdered, but instead to a time in 1915 that was certain to be before he had been conceived in her womb.
He hoped that, entering time before he had existed, he would
cease
to exist.

Over the years, in his most despondent moments, he considered suicide but opted against it because he didn’t believe his father would let him go that easily. If Constantine had ever loved his son, he had not loved him for many decades. But the elder Cloyce was ever passionate about his wealth, his possessions, his
toys
, and he would not tolerate having anything of his taken from him. By Constantine’s way of thinking, the boy was his property, and he would surely try to undo the suicide by going back in time to just before the event, and bring to the present a Timothy who had not yet self-destructed. Then they would keep the boy in even more restricted circumstances, and his existence would be more intolerable than ever.

I was sure he was right about that. But I wasn’t sure he could know what would happen if he traveled back to a time before he had been conceived. The paradox he now represented might be a fraction as complicated as the one he would create with his plan.

Besides, even if his destiny had been to die at nine, back in 1925, and even if the prospect of living as a perpetual child was intolerable to him, I was disturbed about helping him to commit, via the chronosphere, what might be at best a passive suicide. I wanted hope for him, and hope lay in freedom, not in surrender.

Thinking on my feet as we descended the front service stairs, I decided that before we went to the third floor of the guest tower, we would go to the second. Annamaria might be as enigmatic as any character Alice met on the other side of the looking glass, but I knew she would be wiser about Timothy than I would be, considering the pathetic Odd Thomas Standard of Wisdom that she had to exceed.

When we reached the ground floor without being shot or spat
upon, I chose to continue down to the basement, though the search team might still be on that level. The point of reconnoitering is to discover what lies ahead, and the danger of reconnoitering is being discovered
by
what lies ahead before you discover it.

Going down, I glanced back a couple of times, to be sure the boy was staying close, which he was. The second time, he smiled at me to acknowledge my concern, the first smile of his I’d seen. He might be ninety-five and counting, but he was boy enough and vulnerable enough to break your heart with that smile.

Right then, I knew that I would fail him.

His trusting smile was significant in the way that, during some buddy-cop movies, it is reliably significant when in Act 2 the lesser star tells the bigger star that he is going to ask the lesser female lead to marry him. No more than three scenes later, he will be as dead as dead gets, and the bigger star will have the motivation he needs to walk safely through a hailstorm of bullets, slaughter twenty gangsters, and become teary-eyed without anyone thinking that he’s a sissy.

The vast majority of movies aren’t concerned about imitating life, because life avoids the clichés that make for big box office. But sometimes life imitates movies, usually to devastating effect and without the compensation of popcorn.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the door stood wide open to the basement corridor. I hesitated on the last step, listening.

Nobody here but us chickens. I never have fully understood that saying. Chickens can’t talk, and even if they could talk, to whom would they say such a thing?

The air contained a faint ozone scent, as it had for the past few hours. I could smell nothing else—and could hear nothing at all.

I motioned for Timothy to stay where he was while I eased through the open door.

On the farther side of the hallway, doors stood wide or half open, as if the searchers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing up behind themselves.

To the right, the length of the corridor was deserted all the way to the wine cellar.

Immediately to my left, the door to the construction shack that linked the house of the present to the undeveloped land of 1921 stood mostly open, and I could see the draftsman tables, the desks, the old wooden filing cabinets.

If the searchers were still working the basement, they would have been making noise. The deep silence suggested they had found Victoria, freed her, and returned upstairs to hunt down and smack down one ignorant clocker who didn’t know his place in the scheme of things.

I glanced back at Timothy, still in the stairwell, and motioned for him to join me. I wanted him at my side, so that I could grab him and move him with me quickly if suddenly we needed to get out of sight in a room either to the left or right.

Long corridors are dangerous places. If well-armed people are looking for you, you’re exposed to gunfire from one end to the other, in a space that, for the shooter, has all the benefits of an indoor target range.

The best thing you can do is to cover the territory in a timely manner, though it’s not easy to move fast
and
be silent. The tendency is to adopt the Sylvester-the-Cat-stalking-Tweety-Bird exaggerated, high-speed tiptoe, which makes you look ridiculous and, anyway, never works that well for Sylvester.

I instructed Timothy to strive for quiet by cleverly raising one finger to my lips, and then side by side we walked quickly from the west end of the hallway toward the wine cellar at the farther end. The laundry was the next-to-last room on the right, and as we passed
it, I saw that the door was open, though I had left it closed, which meant the searchers had been here and gone.

The door to the furnace room stood open as well, but before we quite got to it, Jam Diu stepped out of there, in front of us, his shotgun leveled at me.

My pistol was aimed at the concrete floor, so that my best hope of wounding him was with a calculated ricochet that not even Annie Oakley would have expected to pull off.